McAdams New Book "Pre-Announcement"

[Phil Nelson]

Here is a little teaser from the Amazon announcement:

"John McAdams does not just address conspiracy theories but also how to think, reason, and judge the evidence in these cases. How do we evaluate eyewitness testimony? How can there be “too much evidence” of a conspiracy? How do we determine whether suspicious people are really suspicious? By putting the JFK assassination under the microscope, McAdams provides a blueprint for understanding how conspiracy theories arise and how to judge the evidence.

"This book puts the reader into a mass of contradictory evidence and presents an intriguing puzzle to be solved. The solution, in each case, involves using intellectual tools. Eyewitness testimony, the notion of “coincidence,” selectivity in the use of evidence, how to choose between contradictory pieces of evidence, the need for evidence to fit a coherent theory, how government works, and basic principles of social theorizing—all provide the elements of how to judge not only the JFK conspiracy, but all conspiracies."

It appears that it may provide interesting insights into how one can go to such great lengths to support the most abstruse and illogical arguments merely because they come from official government sources and ignore the most compelling contradictory evidence. Maybe someone can explain it to me, I doubt I'll have enough patience to endure this particular book.

http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Assassination-Lo...164&sr=8-28

Edited March 5, 2010 by Phil Nelson

[William Kelly]

Here is a little teaser from the Amazon announcement:

"John McAdams does not just address conspiracy theories but also how to think, reason, and judge the evidence in these cases. How do we evaluate eyewitness testimony? How can there be "too much evidence" of a conspiracy? How do we determine whether suspicious people are really suspicious? By putting the JFK assassination under the microscope, McAdams provides a blueprint for understanding how conspiracy theories arise and how to judge the evidence.

"This book puts the reader into a mass of contradictory evidence and presents an intriguing puzzle to be solved. The solution, in each case, involves using intellectual tools. Eyewitness testimony, the notion of "coincidence," selectivity in the use of evidence, how to choose between contradictory pieces of evidence, the need for evidence to fit a coherent theory, how government works, and basic principles of social theorizing—all provide the elements of how to judge not only the JFK conspiracy, but all conspiracies."

It appears that it may provide interesting insights into how one can go to such great lengths to support the most abstruse and illogical arguments merely because they come from official government sources and ignore the most compelling contradictory evidence. Maybe someone can explain it to me, I doubt I'll have enough patience to endure this particular book.

http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Assassination-Lo...164&sr=8-28

I'm sure the History Channell or Tom Hanks or somebody like them will make this into a major TV documentary or even a major motion picture.

But who will they get to play McAdams? Jerry Lewis, Don Knots and Peter Sellers are all dead?

Edited March 6, 2010 by William Kelly

[Phil Nelson]

Here is a little teaser from the Amazon announcement:

"John McAdams does not just address conspiracy theories but also how to think, reason, and judge the evidence in these cases. How do we evaluate eyewitness testimony? How can there be "too much evidence" of a conspiracy? How do we determine whether suspicious people are really suspicious? By putting the JFK assassination under the microscope, McAdams provides a blueprint for understanding how conspiracy theories arise and how to judge the evidence.

"This book puts the reader into a mass of contradictory evidence and presents an intriguing puzzle to be solved. The solution, in each case, involves using intellectual tools. Eyewitness testimony, the notion of "coincidence," selectivity in the use of evidence, how to choose between contradictory pieces of evidence, the need for evidence to fit a coherent theory, how government works, and basic principles of social theorizing—all provide the elements of how to judge not only the JFK conspiracy, but all conspiracies."

It appears that it may provide interesting insights into how one can go to such great lengths to support the most abstruse and illogical arguments merely because they come from official government sources and ignore the most compelling contradictory evidence. Maybe someone can explain it to me, I doubt I'll have enough patience to endure this particular book.

http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Assassination-Lo...164&sr=8-28

I'm sure the History Channell or Tom Hanks or somebody like them will make this into a major TV documentary or even a major motion picture.

But who will they get to play McAdams? Jerry Lewis, Don Knots and Peter Sellers are all dead?

I think W. C. Fields would have been perfect....these skills would require the sleight of hand required in shell games and the ability to doubletalk one's way around real facts and sidestep them with lengthy discourses in why ridiculous theories - e.g. the magic bullet - make sense. The late, great Mr. Fields is the only actor I can visualize in that role.

[Walt Rollins]

There seems to be a real push to get some "lone nutter" publications and films out there. The Horne series and the Douglas book has them nervous I guess. How does this get passed from generation to another I'll never know. There must be some kind of lab that produces defenders of the lone killer theory. I, for the life of me, can't figure out how they keep coming up with people like McAdams, Hanks, Posner, et. al. People thought the world was flat at one time too.

[Pamela Brown]

I'm sure the History Channell or Tom Hanks or somebody like them will make this into a major TV documentary or even a major motion picture.

But who will they get to play McAdams? Jerry Lewis, Don Knots and Peter Sellers are all dead?

Tom Hanks

[Otto B Cornejo]

Jerry Lewis, Don Knots and Peter Sellers are all dead?

Jerry Lewis, dead? I don't think so. Maybe it just seems that way.

[William Kelly]

Jerry Lewis, Don Knots and Peter Sellers are all dead?

Jerry Lewis, dead? I don't think so. Maybe it just seems that way.

Hey, you know, Jerry may still be kicking. Fetzer would say that's another example of my research skills. Jerry and Dean were players back in the fifties and sixties, starting out at Skinny D'Amato's 500 Club in Atlantic City, where Sinatra and the Rat Pack all peformed. They were going to be there for the big party, the 1964 Democratic National Convention, but something happened.

BK

[Pat Speer]

Here is a little teaser from the Amazon announcement:

"John McAdams does not just address conspiracy theories but also how to think, reason, and judge the evidence in these cases. How do we evaluate eyewitness testimony? How can there be “too much evidence” of a conspiracy? How do we determine whether suspicious people are really suspicious? By putting the JFK assassination under the microscope, McAdams provides a blueprint for understanding how conspiracy theories arise and how to judge the evidence.

"This book puts the reader into a mass of contradictory evidence and presents an intriguing puzzle to be solved. The solution, in each case, involves using intellectual tools. Eyewitness testimony, the notion of “coincidence,” selectivity in the use of evidence, how to choose between contradictory pieces of evidence, the need for evidence to fit a coherent theory, how government works, and basic principles of social theorizing—all provide the elements of how to judge not only the JFK conspiracy, but all conspiracies."

It appears that it may provide interesting insights into how one can go to such great lengths to support the most abstruse and illogical arguments merely because they come from official government sources and ignore the most compelling contradictory evidence. Maybe someone can explain it to me, I doubt I'll have enough patience to endure this particular book.

http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Assassination-Lo...164&sr=8-28

Here's but one example of McAdams' using his "intellectual tools" to "judge the evidence." From patspeer.com, Chapter 19:

The respectable face of the LNTs, if not their ringleader and head cheerleader, is John McAdams, professor of Political Science at Marquette University. McAdams has been interviewed on television and NPR numerous times, both about the assassination and other events of the day. His website on the assassination is also number one on google. While much of his website is informative, and while I agree with many, perhaps even a majority of its conclusions, its overall tone is somewhat offensive and insulting to those inclined to suspect a conspiracy.

But that's not why McAdams is King of the Nutters. He's King of the Nutters because he sets a horrible example for others on the alt.assassination.JFK newsgroup he moderates by routinely dismissing EVERYTHING he doesn't want to believe out of hand...and making up transparent and disingenuous excuses to justify his dismissal.

I found out about this the hard way in early 2010. While I had been semi-active on the alt.assassination.JFK newsgroup for years, I had had few run-ins with McAdams prior to late 2009, when in an online debate with researcher Jim DiEugenio he attempted to explain away my photo comparison of the paper bag in its various incarnations as the work of a "crackpot". This, of course, led to much discussion on his newsgroup of this charge, the net result of which was his insisting that my using the same type of camera and same type of lens to demonstrate that the bag in the news photos was much much wider than the bag in the archives was meaningless, and that the ONLY way to compare the Dillard photo (although I corrected him repeatedly, he repeatedly called the news photos of the bag outside the depository, "the Dillard photo") with the archives photos was to create a simulation using the exact same camera and lens as "Dillard's camera" and lens. This, of course, was ludicrous. If we'd been discussing a comparison in which an item appeared to be 3-5% larger than the supposedly exact same item in another picture, that would be one thing. But my photo comparison showed the bag in the news photos to be roughly 25% wider than the supposedly exact same bag in the archives. Nikons equipped with a 50 mm lens don't make middle-distance items look 25% wider than Canons equipped with a 50 mm lens, and McAdams most certainly knows this.

This run-in set the stage. On January 9, 2010, McAdams posted his response to a claim by Ben Holmes that the single-bullet theory bullet trajectory runs right through the spine. His response was illuminating. He revealed his woeful understanding of anatomy and the issues at hand by claiming "How in the world did it have to go through the spine if it entered to the right of the midline?" and then asserting that "You can put a dowel right through, between the transverse processes" (of C7 and T1). He then told Ben Holmes that "you are not allowed to just make up your own 'evidence'." This response intrigued me, and on January 11 I asked McAdams if he had any video of him passing a dowel between the transverse processes, and provided links to some of my slides indicating the bullet would not slide right through, as he'd suggested. He responded "Sorry, I'm not going to the trouble just to please you." (This, to me, was as much as an admission that he'd lied, as his doing so would not have been to please me, but to prove Holmes and myself wrong.) He then refused to acknowledge my slides, by claiming that it wasn't possible to see what my point was. To my point that the HSCA portrayal of the back wound was not at C7/T1 as he claimed, but at T1, he responded "Oh, now I know where people get 'C7/T1.' The Dox drawing shows that", thereby ignoring that the Dox drawing in fact shows the wound at T1. He then claimed that the movement of the back wound by the HSCA trajectory panel (see chapter 11) was not in the least bit suspicious. He wrote "You think every discrepancy shows conspiracy. On this planet, it does not."

He then defended the Artwohl exhibit on his website, and his belief the entrance wound location on the Artwohl exhibit was consistent with the entrance wound location measured by the HSCA pathology panel. He wrote: "Pat, you seem to think that Artwohl shows the wound at C5. It doesn't. You are just drawing stuff, not to scale and not knowing what the point is, and announcing this or that conclusion. To get the wound up to C5, you have to reproduce the lateral photo at a much smaller scale than the Dox Drawing. This stuff means nothing at all unless you scale it properly. Ignore your mis-scaled middle drawing, and you can see that Artwohl's drawing makes sense."

That's right. I had shown him the comparison on the slide above. And he had claimed that the giant head on the left of the slide better matched the skull in the Dox drawing on the right better than the much smaller skull in the middle. I was horrified. This proved to me that McAdams was either a certifiable LuNaTic or the biggest, fattest, xxxx this side of Rush Limbaugh.

I decided to see where this might lead. Since he had previously stated that he both thought the back wound was at C7/T1, and that the bullet creating this wound headed 21 degrees downward, as in the Artwohl exhibit, I asked him where this would exit on Kennedy's body. He conceded the obvious--that he did not agree with the HSCA's conclusion that the bullet went slightly upward in the body--but, strangely, refused to concede that he thought the bullet exited at a different location than the HSCA. When I tried to get him to at least concede that a bullet heading downwards from C7/T1 would not exit at C7, the exit level on the Dox drawings created for the HSCA pathology panel, by pointing out that it was impossible for a bullet heading downwards in the body to exit higher on the body, he again blew my mind. He responded: "It makes no sense to use 'C7' or 'T1'" when talking about the throat wound." I tried again, with similar results: "Your problem is that you arrive at an 'opinion' and then start to treat your opinion as fact." When I tried yet again to get him to agree that Artwohl's depiction of a downward trajectory was at odds with the HSCA's depiction of the bullet trajectory and wound locations, he answered "HSCA trajectory: yes. Wound location: no."

And from there things only got uglier, and weirder... Like a computer starting to melt down after being asked a trick question in a science-fiction movie, McAdams wrote: "Artwohl is correct" and "You are a Ben Holmes clone!..." and then blamed me for my failure to convince him of anything by claiming my slides are "self-contradictory and confusing..."

When I returned to the subject of the slide above, and asked him how he could possibly think the much larger head at left was a much better match for the Dox drawing at right, when the head at left was twice the size of the head in the Dox drawing, he re-confirmed his LuNacy by writing: "You are just making stuff up. Your own composite shows that the 'right photo' (the larger one) corresponds with the Artwohl analysis. Your 'middle photo' shows the head much smaller than in the Artwohl analysis." He then responded to my request that he correct my errors on the slide and create a proper match between the Artwohl analysis and Dox drawing. He wrote "I don't need to. Your own analysis shows Artwohl to be correct."

[Phil Nelson]

Here is a little teaser from the Amazon announcement:

"John McAdams does not just address conspiracy theories but also how to think, reason, and judge the evidence in these cases. How do we evaluate eyewitness testimony? How can there be “too much evidence” of a conspiracy? How do we determine whether suspicious people are really suspicious? By putting the JFK assassination under the microscope, McAdams provides a blueprint for understanding how conspiracy theories arise and how to judge the evidence.

"This book puts the reader into a mass of contradictory evidence and presents an intriguing puzzle to be solved. The solution, in each case, involves using intellectual tools. Eyewitness testimony, the notion of “coincidence,” selectivity in the use of evidence, how to choose between contradictory pieces of evidence, the need for evidence to fit a coherent theory, how government works, and basic principles of social theorizing—all provide the elements of how to judge not only the JFK conspiracy, but all conspiracies."

It appears that it may provide interesting insights into how one can go to such great lengths to support the most abstruse and illogical arguments merely because they come from official government sources and ignore the most compelling contradictory evidence. Maybe someone can explain it to me, I doubt I'll have enough patience to endure this particular book.

http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Assassination-Lo...164&sr=8-28

Here's but one example of McAdams' using his "intellectual tools" to "judge the evidence." From patspeer.com, Chapter 19:

The respectable face of the LNTs, if not their ringleader and head cheerleader, is John McAdams, professor of Political Science at Marquette University. McAdams has been interviewed on television and NPR numerous times, both about the assassination and other events of the day. His website on the assassination is also number one on google. While much of his website is informative, and while I agree with many, perhaps even a majority of its conclusions, its overall tone is somewhat offensive and insulting to those inclined to suspect a conspiracy.

But that's not why McAdams is King of the Nutters. He's King of the Nutters because he sets a horrible example for others on the alt.assassination.JFK newsgroup he moderates by routinely dismissing EVERYTHING he doesn't want to believe out of hand...and making up transparent and disingenuous excuses to justify his dismissal.

I found out about this the hard way in early 2010. While I had been semi-active on the alt.assassination.JFK newsgroup for years, I had had few run-ins with McAdams prior to late 2009, when in an online debate with researcher Jim DiEugenio he attempted to explain away my photo comparison of the paper bag in its various incarnations as the work of a "crackpot". This, of course, led to much discussion on his newsgroup of this charge, the net result of which was his insisting that my using the same type of camera and same type of lens to demonstrate that the bag in the news photos was much much wider than the bag in the archives was meaningless, and that the ONLY way to compare the Dillard photo (although I corrected him repeatedly, he repeatedly called the news photos of the bag outside the depository, "the Dillard photo") with the archives photos was to create a simulation using the exact same camera and lens as "Dillard's camera" and lens. This, of course, was ludicrous. If we'd been discussing a comparison in which an item appeared to be 3-5% larger than the supposedly exact same item in another picture, that would be one thing. But my photo comparison showed the bag in the news photos to be roughly 25% wider than the supposedly exact same bag in the archives. Nikons equipped with a 50 mm lens don't make middle-distance items look 25% wider than Canons equipped with a 50 mm lens, and McAdams most certainly knows this.

This run-in set the stage. On January 9, 2010, McAdams posted his response to a claim by Ben Holmes that the single-bullet theory bullet trajectory runs right through the spine. His response was illuminating. He revealed his woeful understanding of anatomy and the issues at hand by claiming "How in the world did it have to go through the spine if it entered to the right of the midline?" and then asserting that "You can put a dowel right through, between the transverse processes" (of C7 and T1). He then told Ben Holmes that "you are not allowed to just make up your own 'evidence'." This response intrigued me, and on January 11 I asked McAdams if he had any video of him passing a dowel between the transverse processes, and provided links to some of my slides indicating the bullet would not slide right through, as he'd suggested. He responded "Sorry, I'm not going to the trouble just to please you." (This, to me, was as much as an admission that he'd lied, as his doing so would not have been to please me, but to prove Holmes and myself wrong.) He then refused to acknowledge my slides, by claiming that it wasn't possible to see what my point was. To my point that the HSCA portrayal of the back wound was not at C7/T1 as he claimed, but at T1, he responded "Oh, now I know where people get 'C7/T1.' The Dox drawing shows that", thereby ignoring that the Dox drawing in fact shows the wound at T1. He then claimed that the movement of the back wound by the HSCA trajectory panel (see chapter 11) was not in the least bit suspicious. He wrote "You think every discrepancy shows conspiracy. On this planet, it does not."

He then defended the Artwohl exhibit on his website, and his belief the entrance wound location on the Artwohl exhibit was consistent with the entrance wound location measured by the HSCA pathology panel. He wrote: "Pat, you seem to think that Artwohl shows the wound at C5. It doesn't. You are just drawing stuff, not to scale and not knowing what the point is, and announcing this or that conclusion. To get the wound up to C5, you have to reproduce the lateral photo at a much smaller scale than the Dox Drawing. This stuff means nothing at all unless you scale it properly. Ignore your mis-scaled middle drawing, and you can see that Artwohl's drawing makes sense."

That's right. I had shown him the comparison on the slide above. And he had claimed that the giant head on the left of the slide better matched the skull in the Dox drawing on the right better than the much smaller skull in the middle. I was horrified. This proved to me that McAdams was either a certifiable LuNaTic or the biggest, fattest, xxxx this side of Rush Limbaugh.

I decided to see where this might lead. Since he had previously stated that he both thought the back wound was at C7/T1, and that the bullet creating this wound headed 21 degrees downward, as in the Artwohl exhibit, I asked him where this would exit on Kennedy's body. He conceded the obvious--that he did not agree with the HSCA's conclusion that the bullet went slightly upward in the body--but, strangely, refused to concede that he thought the bullet exited at a different location than the HSCA. When I tried to get him to at least concede that a bullet heading downwards from C7/T1 would not exit at C7, the exit level on the Dox drawings created for the HSCA pathology panel, by pointing out that it was impossible for a bullet heading downwards in the body to exit higher on the body, he again blew my mind. He responded: "It makes no sense to use 'C7' or 'T1'" when talking about the throat wound." I tried again, with similar results: "Your problem is that you arrive at an 'opinion' and then start to treat your opinion as fact." When I tried yet again to get him to agree that Artwohl's depiction of a downward trajectory was at odds with the HSCA's depiction of the bullet trajectory and wound locations, he answered "HSCA trajectory: yes. Wound location: no."

And from there things only got uglier, and weirder... Like a computer starting to melt down after being asked a trick question in a science-fiction movie, McAdams wrote: "Artwohl is correct" and "You are a Ben Holmes clone!..." and then blamed me for my failure to convince him of anything by claiming my slides are "self-contradictory and confusing..."

When I returned to the subject of the slide above, and asked him how he could possibly think the much larger head at left was a much better match for the Dox drawing at right, when the head at left was twice the size of the head in the Dox drawing, he re-confirmed his LuNacy by writing: "You are just making stuff up. Your own composite shows that the 'right photo' (the larger one) corresponds with the Artwohl analysis. Your 'middle photo' shows the head much smaller than in the Artwohl analysis." He then responded to my request that he correct my errors on the slide and create a proper match between the Artwohl analysis and Dox drawing. He wrote "I don't need to. Your own analysis shows Artwohl to be correct."

Pat, I nominate you to do the first book review of McAdams' latest work since you have an inside track on his tactics and obviously have already proven you are up to the task....Good Luck!